Honoring
Jefferson

July 1,
2004

In
observance of Independence Day, Time magazine has
put Thomas Jefferson on its cover. Naturally,
the copious articles
within pay his genius worshipful lip service, while missing the essence of
it. They are more interested in current obsessions  such as his
views on race and whether he had children by one of his slaves 
than in his political philosophy.

The last thing Jefferson would
want would be mere lip service. The self-evident truths of
his Declaration of Independence  that all men are created equal,
that their Creator has endowed them with unalienable rights, that
government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed
 were meant to be challenges, not platitudes.

Today we repeat them as if
nobody ever doubted them. And we seldom reflect on what they actually
mean. But Jefferson never ceased pondering their implications, like Euclid
exploring the remotest implications of the simplest axioms.

By todays standards, King
George III was a very mild tyrant indeed. He taxed his American colonists
at a rate of only pennies per annum. His actual impact on their personal
lives was trivial. He had arbitrary power over them in law and in
principle, but in fact it was seldom exercised. If you compare his rule
with that of todays U.S. Government, you have to wonder why we
celebrate our independence. It was a famous victory.

A master of several languages
and many sciences, Jefferson sought to reduce political philosophy to
simple terms every American could understand. The Declaration distills
the political philosophy of John Locke, which Jefferson regarded as the
consensus of reasonable men of his own generation.

Jeffersons 1798 Kentucky
Resolutions  one of his most important writings, neglected and
disparaged today  took the Declarations self-evident truths
a step further. He argued that the free and independent
states, as parties to the Constitution, must not allow the Federal
Government to monopolize constitutional interpretation; for if that
government could define the extent of its own powers, the whole purpose
of the Constitution would be defeated.

One
of Jeffersons recent biographers remarks
that this argument was dangerously close to an argument
for the states right to secede from the Union. That is exactly
where it led, as the Confederacy later contended. The states had the same
right to withdraw from a Union they deemed tyrannical that they had had
to withdraw from the British Empire.

Jefferson was willing to apply
the radical logic of those self-evident truths. He was a conservative
radical  he argued against secession except as a last resort 
but a radical nonetheless. Those truths werent empty slogans; they
were active principles, full of explosive potential.

That potential exploded in 1860,
when states did begin seceding. The new president, Abraham Lincoln, who
claimed to be a disciple of Jefferson, had to ignore much of
Jeffersons thought in order to justify suppressing secession as
rebellion. He incessantly cited the truth that all men are
created equal, but he evaded the part about the consent of the governed
and established military dictatorships in the conquered South, while
effectively criminalizing Jeffersons views on secession in the
North.

All this set a lasting precedent
for pretending to honor Jefferson while distorting his real philosophy.
Following this tradition, Time gives us a toothless
Jefferson whose views wouldnt rattle todays status quo.
His great enemy Alexander Hamilton, who took a far more liberal view of
the implied powers of the Federal Government, is much
more in vogue now.

Today its fashionable to
condescend to Jefferson by saying his philosophy is a bit old-fashioned
 plausible in an agrarian society, maybe, but hopelessly out of date
now. Jefferson would reply that self-evident truths are never
old: A proposition is either true or false. If his truths were
true in 1776, they were always true, and will always remain true.

A slaveowner, Jefferson saw
that those truths were fatal to slavery. And his personal conduct on
slavery has been rightly criticized on his own principles. But that is all
the more reason to take his principles seriously. A man of
Jeffersons intellect, merely creating a philosophy to justify
himself, would have come up with a very different set of principles.

The best way honor Jefferson
 the only true way  is to take his words as seriously as he
meant them.

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